Jérôme,
At least in the USA, digital-based purchases online has pressure city stores either to close down or else to switch course to provide sone special experience to survive. In my City, commercial space has moved to luxury brands, fine dining and services such as Law Firms, Entertainment Industry or supermarkets with specialty bookstores, cheese and creative chocolate shops and the like serving many small niche pockets of interest.
Unfortunately, the City gets no share of the massive online sales diverted to digital megastores.
It has to be that cities receive some wealth back from digital purchases from their population so that everywhere has opportunities for funding the libraries, parks, sports facilities and evening schools that can help make City life more healthy and attractive.
In Germany, are there flows of taxation moneys back to Cities?
Here unfortunately, most massive digital retailers hardly pay taxes and so communities struggle for lack of discretionary funds that can pay for amenities that make life a little more comfortable for everyone.
We haven’t got a 10 billion Euro worth of a big development company’s shortfall in financing, as Germany has and I don’t know how we’d deal with such a disaster!
Asher
While the increase of online retail certainly has had a large influence on retail, I don't think this is the reason for the crash here or even for the changes you are describing in the USA. Online retail has disrupted what can be bought online, but not everything is bought online. Online retail has disrupted things like books, cameras, electronics, etc... but areas like food less so (I know about the recent invention of "dark stores" and quick delivery). If the reason for the changes in retail was the rise in online orders, we would see a correlation between what shops offer in city stores and what cannot be easily bought on order, yet that correlation is not apparent or at least not to me.
More important, I think, are changes in buying habits, the "consumer bifurcation" trend I posted above and the obsolescence of large segments of retail: video rental, CD and record shops, all the electronics associated to them (players and recorders), camera shops (people use a smartphone nowadays and never print pictures), books and magazines (people get their news from the Internet), toys and games (largely replaced by software and apps), etc...
As to taxation, German municipalities benefit from real property and real property transfer taxes. The latter one has increased with the value of the properties. Municipalities also benefit from trade tax, but this would probably only be the case for city-based retailers and not for chains based somewhere else, although I am not sure.
Retail, online or not, is subjected to VAT levied at the state level, not like sales tax in the USA.